What a day this was

Everything was normal this morning. I went for my beachwalk with Sally and Gracie, came home, had breakfast and started work. All good so far. My sister had made arrangements for our friend, Dennis, to drive to Liberia (about an hour east of us) to get some maps printed. I have the only current map updated regularly and I decided to piggyback on the journey and get a new map of the water network. Dennis showed up at the house at eight o'clock. I had a little shopping list for him - office supplies mostly. We estimated the cost of the items I needed and I assured him I would transfer the funds to his account so he would have the cash to pay for them. We do this all the time.

I returned to work and finished my time-critical exercises. This done, I thought I had better transfer the money. This is when everything went south. The bank's website was dead in the water. I had no other way to get money to Dennis. He called when he was at the map-printing place and we reduced the order so that it would be covered by the cash my sister had advanced him. But that was it. I told him I expected the website to be back up soon and when the transfer was done I would advise him. It was lunch time and I figured we would be back to normal by the time he had eaten.

We weren't! Between the jigs and the reels, and a few phone calls, I was becoming dubious that the service would return in time for him to pick up the rest of the items. I even went as far as emailing the bank manager asking her to do the transfer...never heard back. I called Dennis to advise of this maneuver and he said he would wait one more hour.

At around four o'clock the website came back up. I did the transfer and called Dennis. He couldn't withdraw cash from the ATMs but he was able to use his debit card. He came here to deliver the purchases around 8:30 pm......a very long frustrating day for him.

Ah well, that's life in the rainforest....where else would a bank take down it's website without warning and leave it down for almost a whole working day? Ya gotta love it.